


Here in the forest, dark and deep

by Tabata



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alice in Wonderland References, Inspired by Alice in Wonderland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 14:40:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18054440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: Rabbit has been sent to find Alice, but he might be arrived too late.





	Here in the forest, dark and deep

**Author's Note:**

> written for: COW-T #9  
> prompt: Arrive too late

Rabbit shoulders his way through the crowd. The club is already so packed that it's hard to breathe. There's no way to tell what it will be like in a couple of hours, when people will have drunk enough and will be high enough to wreck the place completely. It wouldn't be the first time that corpses are found on the dance floor once the lights come on again. A small price to pay for a night of enjoyment, the King calls it. A tribute to the gods of lust and sin, which Rabbit supposes are none other than him and the Queen.

Very young girls, wearing white bonnets and little else, are walking around with baskets of colorful candies, offering them to everybody. A spread of little bottles with tiny handwritten labels saying _drink me!_ are waiting on the bar counter for people thirsty enough to burn their throat with the clear, spiked liquid they contain. Free drinks and free drugs at the cost of a small admission fee. The King's earnings don't come from the bar or his pushers. He trades in human beings and he wants them mellow and ready to do whatever he wants.

Rabbit looks around and tries to make out the one face he's looking for in the sea of people all around him. But the lights are merciless; they pulse at the rhythm of the pounding music, only delivering reality in flashes. A constantly mutating landscape that gives him no landmarks, except one. He follows the column of smoke at the far end of the room, where he knows that tables and chairs have been permanently removed to make room for carpets and pillows instead.

“Rabbit, I wasn't expecting to see you tonight,” the Caterpillar says. He's leaning as per usual against a few pillows and he's surrounded by a group of half-naked men and women, constantly touching him. Rabbit looks at all those hands and feet that never leave his dark skin and tries not to show his thoughts on his face.

“Where is he?” Rabbit asks, skipping pleasantries they've never exchanged in their life anyway.

“Who?” He asks, making circles of smoke with his hookah.

“Where is he?” Rabbit repeats, more sternly this time. “They said he came here and no one walks in here without you notice.”

The Caterpillar seems pleased by the compliment. “That much is true,” he says, with a smug little smile. “But I'm afraid you are late, so very much late indeed.”

Rabbit can feel the disregard in those seemingly compassionate words and his heart is filled with dread. “What do you mean?” He asks.

The Caterpillar takes his time to answer, knowing that Rabbit can't do anything but wait and the wait is killing him. “I saw him with the twins a while ago,” he finally says, a sequence of gradually smaller circles coming out of his mouth with each word. “He seemed already gone, his eyes... how can I say? Empty. They went that way.”

Rabbit runs as fast as he can. As fast as the people in the club let him. The twins doesn't have any rule. They always do what they want to do, and half the times they're too far gone to know what that is. Rabbit told the King several times that they are out of control and that people you can't control are dangerous, but the King kept them because they amuse him – but he might change his mind now. 

_Find him_ , he said to Rabbit. _He ran away again. That's a real inconvenience. If it happens again, I will have to chain him. Find him, Rabbit, and bring him back to us._.

Find Alice when he runs away is not that easy nowadays. When he was younger, he wouldn't venture further than the garden. He would lose himself in the labyrinth or he would tease the guards until they _played_ with him in the bushes a little bit. But now he's bolder – he cares about himself even less than he did before – and he knows how to leave the property. He hides in the very world the King has built, vanishing in it like he has never been born to begin with. He wants to disappear and maybe tonight he will.

He can follow the tracks of the twins on the people's bodies. They carry the most powerful stuff with them and they pass it around like it's nothing. There's a man having a seizure on the ground and two women laughing very hard at him. A few of the young girls are on the couch, their clothes undone, their bonnets gone. A woman is crying over her empty glass, sitting in a pool of her own piss. The twins themselves are in a pitiful state, although they're more lucid than most.

“Rabbit,” one of them says, patting his shoulder. “It's nice to see you here.”

“You don't come to the club that much anymore, do you?” The other says.

Rabbit pushes him and his twin brother aside, his eyes searching the room frantically. And there he is, lying on the floor, limbs tossed around like a broken doll. “Alice!” He screams over the music and the crying and the screams of the people around him, which in their drug-induced haze he scared to death.

“Oh, he's sleeping,” one of the twins say.

“He's been like that for an hour,” the other say.

“He's a lightweight, isn't it?” Showing him a little bag filled with green and pink powder. “Doesn't hold his candies, this one.”

“Alice,” Rabbit calls him again, slapping him gently. He sits down on the ground and pulls his limp body in his lap, cradling him. “Alice, please, wake up. I'm Rabbit, please, kiddo, don't do this to me.”

“He's still breathing,” one of the twins say, trying to be helpful. “I think.”

Rabbit feels Alice's neck. His heartbeat is so faint that Rabbit doesn't know if it's really beating or if he's only imagining it because he wants so much for it to be true. “What did he take?” He asks, combing Alice's blond hair back from his face.

“Everything,” the other twin says, chuckling. “He was a lot of fun until he lasted. He didn't say no to anything.”

“You two are in deep shit.”

“Hey, it's not our fault if he can't handle us,” the twins protest at the same time.

“He's the King's son, you idiots!” Rabbit snaps, angrily. “You might want to rethink that.”

The twins freak out at that, but Rabbit couldn't care less. He would kill them if he only was at liberty to do that. He has killed so many like them before. There's nothing in them – no pride, no honor, no nothing – they're empty useless shells, born in the mud, disposable, destined to die the same way they lived, in the darkness of this shithole to make someone else rich.

Rabbit picks Alice up like a ragdoll. The kid is so still and cold that he already feels like a corpse in his arms.  
 _It's late, it's late, it's late,_ his mind keeps telling him. But he can't afford to listen.


End file.
